


and from sarah’s rib

by swu



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Biblical References, Gen, Sarah and Helena do not actually exist as Sarah and Helena in this AU, just fyi in case that isn't clear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:39:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4180176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swu/pseuds/swu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And from Sarah's rib, God created Helena.</p><p>Or at least, God meant to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and from sarah’s rib

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my sort of biological chimeras / Genesis ficlet that I’d started after I wrote [this Rachel fic about chimeras](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2654150) but kind of still wanted to write a Rachel/sestre au with lots more incoherent biblical allusions.
> 
> I’d kind of given up on ever actually posting this, but since biological chimeras became CANON (!!!!) I felt like I should. I haven’t touched it in like half a year and I don’t really have any anymore where I wanted to go with it, so it’s pretty unedited and I’m not sure how much sense any of this makes oops…
> 
> Thanks to [sanetwin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanetwin) and [valiantprincess](http://archiveofourown.org/users/valiantprincex) for reading this over when I first wrote it!

**And from Sarah's rib, God created Helena.**

Or at least, God meant to.

In the womb of their mother, God had begun to cleave the twins apart, but Helena had found such comfort, such a home, next to Sarah's beating heart, in her womb within their womb, that she chose to stay there. She burrowed so deeply into her sister's flesh, until their souls were so entwined, that even God could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Just as God had said, “Let there be light!” and there was light; and just as He separated the light from the darkness; and just as He called the light day and the dark night; and just as He saw the day and saw that it was good; so He wanted to see His most beloved creation, and see that it was great.

But when His daughter was born, she was simply a girl. Not twins as God had planned. Not evening and morning, not one full day, but a twilight in between. She was not _quite_ just a girl, though, and God had not planned for that either. God had said, “Let there be life!” and _she_ emerged instead. And God saw what He had made, and He saw that she… was.

The God of Science made two little babies, and then they became one.

God went by many names—creator, father, Swan Man, Andrew, Ethan. Failure, dead, gone. Wrong, wrong, _wrong_.

He had thought Himself omnipotent, but He was mistaken. For there was one thing He could not understand, and that was love. What it means to love another person so wholly and completely, a love that is selfless. Self _less_.

A man once said that to make one brother, it takes two men. But he was wrong as well. Because the daughter of God was a sister, a twin, all on her own. She was _both_ of them. Two souls, two selves, in one body.

Helena loved her sister more than she loved her self, so she gave up her life, her very existence, for that love. And so as Sarah grew inside their mother’s womb, Helena—who was never truly born and so never named Helena, though we’ll call her this for simplicity’s sake—grew inside Sarah. (Sarah, too, went by many names, none of which were Sarah as she did not have a light to balance her darkness, but for now Sarah is what we’ll call her.)

As they grew, whatever their name would eventually become, Helena claimed different parts of her sister. Sarah’s blood became Helena’s, an organ here, some flesh there. Sarah became the right, and the left… was _not_ -Sarah.

God, who spoke only in genomes and nucleotides and knew nothing of souls, did not realize this, for to Him, to all His tests and His science, the two parts of His little girl looked the same.

When Sarah was born, she knew nothing of this either. God (father, failure, _dead_ ) had left her before she ever had the chance to know Him, left her to grow up completely and utterly alone.

But she, the daughter of her absent God, was never really alone. Somehow, though trapped in her lonely Paradise, she never felt the urge to run; she never needed to seek out that second half of her soul, because it already existed within her.

All she ever needed was a mirror—she could look into her own eyes and see her sister’s staring back out at her. It was there that she found her soul, found herself, so why would she ever need to search anywhere else?

And yet, though she was not alone in the way God feared He had left her, she still could never escape that shadow of a loss. For she couldn’t help but feel her sister’s presence within her as the absence of a sister without, as something that could have been, should have been. They could have been two, could have been more. And if they had been two as they had been intended, perhaps God would have looked at His creation, perhaps He would have seen that it was exceedingly good, and perhaps He would have stayed.

After a while, when she looked into the mirror, she refused to see the love that formed the very foundation of her being. It simply hurt too much. Because while she felt more whole than anyone else could ever understand, while she was a completely singular creation, and while she loved herself for it… it turns out she might have loved a sister more.

She could have gone by many names—Sarah, Helena, not-Sarah, sister (sisters), twin (twins). But those names saddened her, reminded her of her singularity, of the sister she never knew, and of the God, the Father, who abandoned her. To think of the parts that made her filled her heart with a heavy emptiness, so it was not any of those names that she called herself.

The twins—night and day, dark and light—were what she could have been, should have been. They were what her absent God had wanted to create, what He wanted to look upon and see that it was good. But she was only one, and good she was not.

When she looked into the mirror, she steeled her eyes lest she accidentally glimpse the love, the loss, that lay within. When she looked into the mirror, she armored every facet of her self so nothing could penetrate it, or so she told herself. Perhaps she armored herself only to keep her pieces together, to keep that secret part of her soul from leaving her as well.

And so when the daughter of God looked at her hardened reflection, looked at the face that was not good but simply _was_ , the only name on her lips was _Rachel_.

**Author's Note:**

> > _In genetics, a **biological chimera** (after the creature Chimera in Greek Mythology) is a single organism is composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues. One type of chimerism occurs when two separate fertilized eggs fuse together early on in embryogenesis. This is thought to be extremely rare in humans, though cases have been recorded in the past. These cases generally involve dizygotic (i.e. nonidentical, fraternal) twins that have merged; however, the same process could theoretically occur with monozygotic (identical) twins, though because of the nearly identical nature of their DNA, the condition would be extremely difficult to detect._


End file.
